DOWNEY – “All You Can Eat,” an exhibit by artist and illustrator Sean Norvet featuring new paintings and sculptural intermedia works, opens at Stay Gallery this Friday night from 7-11 p.m. This will be Norvet’s first solo exhibit and will be on display until Nov. 30.

Born and raised in Los Angeles, Norvet’s paintings are usually precisely executued in oils on panels, but his style and subjects “reflect the media-saturated, commercialized environment we inhabit today,” he said.

His work has been described as “deconstructive and simultaneously jarring, intense, hilarious and disturbing. It is sometimes explosive, sometimes still, and often mashes up elegant photo-realism with two-dimensional cartoon buffoonery.”

His three-dimensional sculptural installations, usually involving food, offer a satiric, ephemeral cheapness in which the medium is the message. As urgent and commanding as his images are, he playfully invites viewers in to share the laugh; he doesn’t preach.

Norvet says he has always been fascinated with the way food is marketed and pushes on consumers as a form of comfort, a way to belong, or a way to “kill the anxiety of existence,” but later realized it was not just food that was being pushed.

“From the moment we wake, until the moment we log off and sleep, we participate in a culture that defines us by the information we consume, repeat, ignore and take in,” Norvet says. “We may spend hours a day participating with others without leaving our seats, let alone the fact we may ever meet the people we participate with in the flesh.

“Sculptural intermedia works, including one large installation piece, define an atmosphere that complements several large paintings. Large ‘portraits’ reveal individuals as the sum of what they consume; the food, information, memories, fantasies, regrets, and nonsense we each are bombarded with constantly.